Ram woke this morning happy that Dad was coming round. He was rather manic about it even thought Dxh was here the day before yesterday. Ram was at least awake early enough for us to read some more Discworld. Because these are adult books they do take longer to read, especially when being read aloud.
We often find children's books are too short, and I heard a snatch of a conversation on Radio 4 the other day where a children's author said that before the Harry Potter books publishers were telling children's authors to keep books to 50,000 words because they thought that children no longer had the concentration for books longer than that. Then along came Rowling (longest Potter book so far has about 214,000) and now they realise that kids can read longer books!
When Dxh got here he and Ram decided to play chess again, only this time we got out the real chess set. We commented that a couple of summers ago Ram played a game with Dxh in the garden. Ram would make a move, then run round the garden twice, then came back and make a move then run off again. Today the difference is amazing! He sat for the whole game and only once or twice did he get up for a swing on the trapeze.
Local authorities seem to be complaining that they can't tell if a child is learning when there is no curriculum or testing. Certainly I can see in school that teachers need to test a child to see what they have learned. But with home education the parent has the continuity of being with the child year after year and can see the progress a child makes. I don't need to test Ram to see that this year he can sit down and concentrate on a game of chess, when a couple of years ago he couldn't.
Actually, not only can he sit down and play, he can win against his father, who was trying very hard to win!
We ended up with a late lunch so that they could finish the game, then we started sorting out the sleeping area for our friends coming. We needed to put up a bit of cloths line to separate the large sleeping area (we have an open plan barn upstairs and down) and hang a curtain on it. Ram helped me put all the curtain hooks in and I got to explain how a curtain is made.
We then went back downstairs for tea, which ended up around the computer having fun. It was one of those days when we kept coming up with things we wanted to know so the three of us sat around the computer looking things up. We also showed Dxh the Bloxorz game, looked up some lyrics to some music, listened to Voodoo Child which is the song that was in Doctor Who the other week, and generally had a good laugh. All the time Ram was talking non stop!
Of course things settled down when Dxh went home and Doctor Who started. Wow, what a finish to the series. We were discussing it still at bed time. So many little bits of a puzzle, and now the long wait until Christmas for the special and next year for the next series.
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